when every last heart in the world breaks
by The Crownless Queen
Summary: "Are you real?" "You're asking the wrong question, Albus." [...] "Am I real?" "Now that is quite the mystery, isn't it?"


This was written for the Quidditch League, Round 5: What's In A Name, CHASER 2 for the Appleby Arrows: Lavender (as inspired by Lavender Brown): Write about a character who is not able to trust someone they love, using the prompts: (song) Amnesia - 5 Seconds of Summer, (poem) 'Flower of Love' by Oscar Wilde, (dialogue) "I wish you had told me before I… " / "What? Before you what?" and the Love in Motion event on the Hogwarts forum (AlbusGellert).

This is loosely inspired by me watching the Matrix too many times.

 _Word count:_ 2538

 **when every last heart in the world breaks**

 _Ah! what else had I to do but love you? - Flower of Love, Oscar Wilde_

 _Sometimes I start to wonder, was it just a lie? / If what we had was real, how could you be fine? - Amnesia - 5 Seconds of Summer_

Sometimes, Albus sees gold flash at the corner of his eyes. It's never real, but it always makes his heart beat faster, always makes him stop and turn around.

 _What if, what if?_ his brain whispers, but no, it's never him. Of course it isn't.

Gellert is gone, nothing but a handful of memories Albus can't really bear to think about, and yet, Albus sees him everywhere.

It is, it seems, the price he has to pay for his mistakes, for taking so long to believe what his sister had spent years telling him.

 **.x.**

The thing is, the world feels odd to Albus sometimes. It's like it's out of balance somehow, like he's standing in a room with two clocks that tick with only one second of difference—just enough for the subconscious mind to take note of it and be disturbed, but not enough for it to be noticed unless one goes looking for it.

But Gellert… Gellert feels _real_ in the way the rest of the world around them doesn't. There's a _tangibility_ to him that Albus can't explain, and it draws him in like a moth to a flame.

 _(and oh, how brightly does Gellert burn)_

It's so easy to be around him, to escape from his dreadful monotonous life taking care of his sister and little brother, and in less than a week, it feels like they've known each other forever.

Aberforth doesn't trust him, of course, but then again when has his brother ever trusted anyone?

"I've heard he was expelled from Durmstrang, Albus. _Durmstrang_ ," Aberforth hisses one night, voice kept low so as to not disturb Ariana. "Who knows what he's done for them to do that!"

Albus rolls his eyes, waving the concern away. "It was a misunderstanding, I'm sure," he explains, because that's what Gellert always says when Albus asks. It has to be true—Gellert wouldn't lie to him.

 _(would he?)_

"Well if you're _sure_ ," Aberforth drawls, and though his grin is mean and angry, his eyes are concerned.

"I am," Albus replies, and he tries to convey the way he _knows_ , deep in his bones and soul, that Gellert would never hurt him. "He understands me," he adds, and hopes it's as true as he thinks.

Aberforth laughs bitterly and throws his arms up in the air. "It's your funeral."

 **.x.**

When Ariana was seven, something happened to her. She's almost thirteen now, and she's always refused to tell anyone what, exactly, that something had been.

She has, however, plenty of other things to say.

 _(Mother used to listen to her, but Mother died a year ago)_

 _(Ariana's magic killed her)_

 _(sometimes, Albus thinks it might have been Ariana herself)_

There are periods—entire days, sometimes even weeks—where Ariana is too catatonic to even speak. Her mind, the Healers had said, was elsewhere. Ironically enough, those are the only periods she's safe to be around.

Anytime else, and there was the risk of her magic lashing out at the slightest provocation, harming _(killing)_ anyone in the vicinity.

But even when her magic's not out of control, Ariana is… odd. Weirder than anyone else Albus knows, and Hogwarts has introduced him to plenty of… singular personalities.

Albus still remembers the screaming nightmares she had, where she woke up swearing that the world wasn't real, that they were trapped in an illusion.

"They're killing us, they're killing us," she had babbled, tears streaming down her face as she heaved. "Can't you feel it?"

Even now, she still insists, in private, that their world is a fake, that there was a great war that they lost, and now their minds are being used in some kind of machine, are being kept busy as their bodies are harvested.

It hurts him every time, to see his little sister's wild and pained eyes as she begs for someone—anyone—to believe her, but the worst part of it is the guilt.

Because here is the thing he'll never dare tell her: some part of him, Merlin forbid, does believe her.

 **.x.**

About a ten minutes walk away from Albus' house, there is an empty field. Nobody ever goes there, and somehow it's far away enough that no one can see what he's doing there. Albus found that place when he was nine and hiding from his parents, and since then, he's used it whenever he wants to be alone with his thoughts or practice magic in secret.

Gellert is the first person—the only person, in fact—that Albus introduces the place to. Gellert, with his golden hair and teasing smiles, seems to belong in these sun-kissed fields more than Albus himself does.

They spend entire afternoons there, sitting side by side under the shade of an old apple tree that hasn't given a single fruit in all the years Albus has come here.

They talk a lot, about all sort of things. About magic:

" _Did you know," Gellert says, "that it's possible to do wandless magic if you're dedicated enough? It's not even a matter of power, not really, but of will." His eyes shine madly as he says the word 'will', and something inside Albus' chest constricts painfully. Gellert looks like an angel-a god even, too perfect for Albus to set his eyes upon-and Albus can't quite seem to breathe right._

" _Can you do it?"_

 _Gellert hums softly. He snatches a blade of grass from the ground between them and without taking his eyes off Albus, he blows on it gently. He never says a word, but still the blade of grass shimmers and changes, until cupped between Gellert's fingers is a miniature sunflower._

" _For you," he says, before offering Albus another blade of grass. "Now you try it."_

 _Albus' heart beats faster and faster as he accepts it and his fingers graze against Gellert's, but he forces himself not to let anything show._

" _Thanks," he says._

About the magical world:

" _I wish we could just stop hiding," Albus replies to one of Gellert's numerous comments about the muggles in the village. There are so many of them that Albus can't quite keep track of Gellert's points, especially when the other boy's hand rests so close to his thigh that he can feel its warmth, but he does understand the feeling intimately._

 _After what happened to Ariana, of course he does._

" _We deserve to be ourselves out in the open," Gellert agrees, and this moment feels precious and so very fragile, like the wrong world could suddenly break it and cause their entire world to come tumbling down on them._

 _The summer sun caresses Albus' skin warmly and for a single moment, the atmosphere turns scorching hot._

" _We do, don't we?" Albus echoes softly, and something inside him yearns._

 _Gellert smiles, and it is perfect, perfect, perfect._

 _(too perfect, in fact)_

And finally, about Ariana:

" _What's going on with your sister, anyway?"_

 _Had the question come from anyone else, Albus would have cursed them. But it comes from Gellert, who with each and every passing day carves himself a little deeper into Albus' heart, and so Albus can't seem to deny him anything._

" _She's sick," Albus explains, because it's easier than saying nobody knows exactly what happened to her to make her so incredulous of the world around them._

 _(and what does it say about Albus, that he believes her sometimes?)_

" _She has delusions," he continues, the words bitter in his mouth. "She thinks our world isn't real, that it's a trap."_

" _Oh, really?"_

 _The thing is, Albus has never been able to speak of this with anybody, ever. So when Gellert-kind, handsome Gellert-expresses compassion and interest for the matter, Albus tells him everything._

 _And here is the real tragedy of this: he sees the cruel glint in Gellert's eyes but he ignores it, fooling himself into believing it to be a trick of the light._

 _Or at least, his head believes it._

 _His heart, however, is another matter entirely, and it remembers._

" _And you, what do you think?" Gellert asks him urgently once Albus' story is over._

 _Albus blinks, and Gellert's perfect image is replaced by an ugly, twisted one-a snake, eating its own tail and watching the world burn. He blinks again, and Gellert's perfect self is back._

 _Albus swallows hard and looks into the eyes of this boy he knows he loves, and he lies._

" _I think muggles drove my sister mad, and that she's trying to cope with what happened to her in her own way."_

 _It's what all the healers they've seen have told them, and Albus has never been more grateful for their platitudes. At least it gives him something to tell Gellert._

 _Gellert smiles, and Albus' stomach unclenches in relief. It feels like he's passed a test he didn't even know he was taking, and Merlin, how are things so_ wrong _?_

 **.x.**

The more of himself he pours into Gellert, the more _real_ the world feels, and the more unsettled Albus starts to feel.

His brother's words _("It's your funeral!")_ echo in his mind all the time now. Sometimes, his sister's face, screaming, flashes before his eyes, an omen Albus finds harder to dismiss with every time it appears.

But even as it becomes harder and harder to shush his doubts, he still keeps on loving Gellert. He doesn't know how to stop.

Summer days shorten into autumn and Albus introduces Gellert to his siblings properly. Aberforth scowls and leaves the room when Gellert enters it, and Ariana… Ariana pales so swiftly Albus thinks she's going to faint. She doesn't, but she refuses to look Gellert in the eyes whenever their paths cross.

Something about the man he's fallen in love with scares his little sister to death, and Albus has no idea what it is, or what he can do about it.

But by Merlin, he does hope that she's overreacting.

 _(please let her be overreacting)_

 **.x.**

The longer this—whatever _this_ is—is going on, the easier it becomes to see that there is something wrong, and not just with Gellert, but with the world around them too.

It's like it glitches sometimes. There's something cold in Gellert's eyes, something fathomless that appears often enough now for Albus to wonder how he never noticed it before.

Time seems to behave oddly around them too; some moments stretching impossibly while others seem to pass in the blink of an eye. Or well, there is no _seem_ about it: they do pass that quickly.

 _Something_ is going to happen soon; he can feel it.

And then it does: one night, he wakes up screaming from a nightmare he can't seem to remember. The next morning, Ariana and Aberforth look at him with pity, and his sister rests a hand on his forearm softly.

"I'm sorry," she says, but she never voices what she's apologizing for. "But do you _see_ now?"

"I don't," Albus lies, even as he takes in this odd new world, full of shapes and colors and meanings he'd never have guessed at before. His siblings look disappointed, and Albus' heart twinges in his chest as he finds that he struggles to remember a time where they looked at him differently.

"I have to go see Gellert," he blurts out before his heart gets the better of him, before he confesses that he gets it now-that he can see through this thin veil of false reality and into the _real_ world. The one they're trapped out of as their minds wander what might be the most intricate prison of all times, that now that he _knows_ he needs out of this place too.

 _(and really, Albus should have realized this long ago-after all, how could something as unexplainable as magic be anything but a trap designed to keep their minds ensnared?)_

Aberforth's eyes narrow in anger. "Come on, Albus, _wake up!_ Can't you see that he's not worth it? That he's using you?"

Albus sends back his best glare. "Gellert isn't using me." _He loves me_ , he doesn't say. He might have once, before, but as the thought forms in his mind Albus realizes he isn't sure that it's true anymore.

When did he stop being sure? When did he stop being able to trust that Gellert was honest with him?

 _(Merlin, was he even ever able to?)_

He tastes bile in his throat. Dread pools in his stomach, but he pushes through. This is why he just lied, after all: he has to know, has to see what his siblings do with his own eyes-has to find out what, exactly, make them distrust Gellert so much.

Every step out of the room feels heavier than the last, but Aberforth and Ariana's eyes are heavier still on his back.

He thinks he can already hear his heart breaking.

 **.x.**

When Gellert shows up on what has become their clearing, he takes one look at Albus' eyes and says, "I guess the jig is up, then?"

He doesn't even sound sorry.

"Are you real?" Albus hears himself asking. He's not sure why he's not voicing any of the hundreds of reproaches his broken heart is begging him to make instead. Maybe those would be too personal.

"You're asking the wrong question, Albus. Besides, I think we both know you know the answer to that already."

He does-it's written in the world around them, in the way Gellert seems so unmoored from the thread of reality.

"Can I trust you?" he asks instead of focusing on this revelation.

"Come on, I know you can do better than that."

"... Am _I_ real?"

"Now _that_ is quite a mystery, isn't it?" Gellert smiles, sharp as a blade and twice as deadly, and something inside Albus dies.

"I know I am," Albus says. Behind him, the world flares. _Wake up_ , it whispers in his mind with his brother's voice. _Just a little longer_ , Albus whispers back.

"I wish you had told me before I… " Albus trails off, not even sure why he's still trying when Gellert looks so damn unapologetic.

"What? Before you what?"

"Before I fell in love with you."

"Oh, but _Albus_ , you falling in love with me was always the whole point of us meeting. We can't have you leave, after all. We thought some _attachment_ might make you stay. Too bad it didn't work—we could be great together, you know."

And somehow, that's what does it—what frees him, in a way.

"I see." He smiles, quiet and determined, and something on his face must alarm Gellert because the victory on his face twists into rage and-

It doesn't matter. He's too late to do anything anyway.

 _(Aberforth was right-it really is just like waking up)_

 **.x.**

Albus comes back to a body he hasn't ever used—to weak limbs and easily blinded eyes; but he also comes back to a world that feels, smells and tastes real.

It is, he thinks as his eyes meets his siblings' for the first time in this world, a pleasure everyone should get to know.

Maybe it's time they did something about that.


End file.
